The music world is full of what ifs. What if the Beatles hadn’t split up when they did? What if punk had never happened? What if Syd Barrett had stayed on as Pink Floyd’s frontman? What if David Bowie had never invented Connect 4? All interesting but hypothetical questions to mull over with your mates over a pint. All merely rhetorical questions.
But if you ever wondered what American roots music might have sounded like had it not been guided by the sound of the Mississippi River’s beguiling tides, but instead was the product of the Dutch Delta, then we are on safer ground. It would have sounded like Joseph Turner & The Dudes of Hazard. Probably!
The new one, “Travelin’ Heart,” is a great blend of sounds, a full band filling out a core sound built on acoustic guitar, mandolin, and pedal steel. It balances a rock drive with folky finesse, Americana vibes with pop contagion. Slightly dreamlike, wonderfully relatable.
And it comes as no surprise that this ode to the liberating momentum of travel, both physical and, perhaps also, metaphorical, first raised its head during Turner’s own journey down the East Coast of America, and so is the offspring of both places and any number of genres, garnered from both the old world and the new.
Nether-icana anyone?
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